Explaining Hitler

by Ron Rosenbaum

  More important, descriptions of Geli’s character are deeply divided between golden and much darker hues. Many observers recall her reverently as “a deeply religious person who attended mass regularly,” a “princess” whose regal bearing and beauty “would cause people on the street to turn around and stare at her.” The golden-girl school of Geli’s character sums her up as “the personification of perfect young womanhood . . . deeply revered, even worshipped by her uncle. [Hitler] watched and gloated over her like some gardener with a rare and lovely bloom.”

  Others saw her as quite another kind of bloom. Less a princess than a sorceress, less a churchgoing Aryan vestal than a calculating opportunist, “an empty-headed little slut, with the coarse bloom of a servant-girl.” This stinging phrase comes from Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, the Harvard-educated art-book publisher and long-time confidant of Hitler, who may have been as close to him as anyone in the 1920s. Hanfstaengl took quite a violent dislike to Geli Raubal, as apparently a number of males in the Hitler inner circle did, perhaps because they were envious of her growing sway over him or fearful for the consequences of their intimacy, the potential for scandal.

  Hanfstaengl attempts to buttress his slur on Geli as a slut by reporting that—despite Hitler’s “moon-calf” obsession with her—Geli betrayed him sexually with his chauffeur, Emil Maurice. And, even more woundingly, that she planned to leave him permanently to marry a man whom Hanfstaengl describes as “a Jewish art teacher in Linz.”

  Some women, too, described Geli resentfully. She was “coarse, provocative and a little quarrelsome,” Henrietta Hoffmann (the daughter of Hitler’s personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann) told John Toland. But to Hitler, Henrietta sniffed, Geli was “irresistibly charming,” and she took advantage of it: “If Geli wanted to go swimming it was more important than the most important conference.”

  There is little doubt that, golden or dark hearted, Geli by the end had incited in Hitler what Alan Bullock calls a “jealous possessiveness” that would have fatal consequences. But possessiveness of what?

  In the beginning, in the early twenties, the relationship was no doubt wholly avuncular. Still, to the barely teenaged Geli, living in straitened circumstances with her widowed mother in Vienna, a visit from her famous Uncle Alf must have been a rather special occasion. The man emerging from the powerful, chauffeured Mercedes, a man already making headlines, must have cut a dashing if not romantic figure in the military-style cloak he favored then. He came cloaked as well with an aura of destiny—he was a man with a mission embarked on a daring and dangerous crusade.

  And then, in the mid-twenties, he invited Geli to become part of that mission. Released from prison with restrictions on his political activities, he’d retreated to his aerie amid the Obersalzberg peaks to recoup his strength for an eventual comeback. The summons came from the mountains to Geli and her mother, who was then working in the kitchen of a Jewish school for girls in Vienna. It was the chance to escape from the anonymous drudgery of their life and join Hitler as live-in housekeepers in the stunningly picturesque Alpine retreat.

  Suddenly, at age eighteen, Geli was in the hall of the mountain king. In the crystalline air of the Obersalzberg, Hitler was living the life of a Nordic demigod, drawing on the purity of his surroundings to restore his strength for a return, the revenge, the Götterdämmerung to come. And Geli, now a young woman, became drawn into the drama, rising from Cinderella-like servant girl to full consort at the court of the exiled prince, a role that seemed to fuel romantic fantasies on both sides.

  Before long, Geli’s mother was left behind with the housekeeping chores while Geli was put on display at Hitler’s side. Konrad Heiden describes Hitler squiring Geli around the bucolic mountain villages “riding through the countryside, showing the blonde [sic] child how ‘Uncle Alf’ could bewitch the masses.” It soon became evident that “Uncle Alf” was becoming “bewitched” as well.

  Before long, Hitler’s preoccupation with Geli causes Henny Hoffmann to tut-tut about the meetings he missed to take Geli swimming. And party officials such as one Gauleiter Munder, a district leader from Württemberg, complained that Hitler was “being excessively diverted by the company of his niece from his political duties.” (Hitler fired Munder shortly after his complaint became known.)

  Photographs from the period show Geli blossoming into womanhood, affecting the marcelled wave of the Germanic flapper, leaning over a tanned arm in a sleeveless dress at a dinner party to engage in earnest conversation with stern-looking SA chiefs, playing the role of the Führer’s hostess to the hilt.

  This was their public relationship; the nature of the private one is less clear. There were, at Berchtesgaden, barriers to the kind of intimacy they could enjoy. For one thing, they were not alone. They were living under the same roof but under the eye of Geli’s mother. And then, of course, there was Hitler’s rather public dalliance with local maiden Mimi Reiter.

  No, if things changed between them from the avuncular to the sexual, it is unlikely to have happened until later, when Geli moved to Munich, leaving her mother behind to tend to the Obersalzberg house while Geli took up residence with Hitler, ostensibly to serve as his housekeeper and take music lessons for the singing career she’d suddenly declared she wanted to pursue.

  The question of the nature of Hitler’s affection for Geli Raubal has dominated the literature on the question. Many accounts paint a picture of her as the unwilling prisoner of a drooling pervert, or at the very least captive of a twisted Platonic possessiveness. But there is some testimony that indicates a different view: that although Geli may have been in Hitler’s thrall, she was also enthralled by him in a starstruck way. One of the most interesting observations on this question can be found in the postwar recollections of Geli’s Munich voice instructor, Albert Vogel, who claimed that Geli told him repeatedly how thrilled she was to be Hitler’s companion and how she hoped and expected they’d get married.

  And Toland suggests that it was Geli’s jealousy of Hitler rather than his of her that led to her impulsive suicide. Toland interviewed many of the same members of the household staff as Detective Sauer did and found them more talkative long after the war than they had been in 1931. One of them told Toland a story about the reason for Geli’s distress when she’d run out of Hitler’s bedroom the final afternoon of her life: that she’d found in there a gushing note to Hitler from Eva Braun about an evening at the theater she’d spent with him. It’s an anecdote that seems dismissable for its second-rate, Dynasty-like, plot-point sentimentality. But the second-rateness of the Hitler milieu is often underrated, the Wagnerian themes overrated as explanation.

  Whoever was in thrall to whom, the relationship was nicht natürlich in at least one specific sense: ecclesiastical legality. Because of their tangled family relatedness, if they had contemplated marriage a papal decree would have to be obtained to evade the stricture against the borderline-incestuous consanguinity of the two of them. If the possibility of legal consummation of their relationship was problematic, the question of whether and what kind of physical consummation took place has been the subject of endless wrangling among writers on the subject, a fractious debate which has evolved into roughly three schools of Hitler Sexuality: the Party of Normality, the Party of Asexuality, and the Party of Perversion.

  Even within the Party of Perversion there are divisions. Konrad Heiden, the highly respected though somewhat Suetonian biographer of Hitler who had contacts within Hitler’s Brown House demimonde, will only go so far as to say that Hitler entertained perverse fantasies about Geli; only Otto Strasser goes so far as to suggest they were consummated, although he claims he heard the details from Geli herself.

  Heiden places the moment of change in the relationship at a point sometime before Hitler moved into his princely new residence with Geli. Indeed, Heiden believes Hitler’s approach to Geli led to an elaborate hushed-up scandal that became “one of the reasons for Hitler’s change of lodgings.”

  Here,
then, in Heiden’s words is the locus classicus of the Hitler perversion legend. The story Heiden tells has had a remarkable longevity and influence; it echoes in the subcurrent of Hitler rumor and gossip that was picked up by the OSS’s Walter Langer, who gave it the imprimatur of official intelligence. It’s a story gloated over “like some gardener with a rare and lovely bloom” (as it was said Hitler gloated over Geli) by psychohistorians and psychoanalysts who have felt that here must be the dark, hidden, repressed truth about Hitler’s psyche. It’s been picked up and mythologized in the fictions of Thomas Pynchon (his Geli-like figure in Gravity’s Rainbow) and Steve Erickson (Geli, the veiled central figure in Tours of the Black Clock, is a kind of Scheherazade of pornography for Hitler).

  Heiden calls the story he tells—the affair of the purloined pornography—the opening act of “the tragedy of Hitler’s private life.” It has become the second great temptation of Hitler explainers (the first being the Hans Frank Jewish-blood explanation).

  “One day,” Heiden begins, Hitler’s

  parental relations to his niece Geli ceased to be parental. Geli was a beauty on the majestic side . . . simple in her thoughts and emotions, fascinating to many men, well aware of her electric effect and delighting in it. She looked forward to a brilliant career as a singer and expected “Uncle Alf” to make things easy for her. Her uncle’s affection, which in the end assumed the most serious form, seems like an echo of the many marriages among relatives in Hitler’s ancestry [in its borderline incestuousness].

  At the beginning of 1929, Hitler wrote the young girl a letter couched in the most unmistakable terms. It was a letter in which the uncle and lover gave himself completely away; it expressed feelings which could be expected from a man with masochistic coprophilic inclinations bordering on what Havelock Ellis calls “undinism” [the desire to be urinated upon for sexual gratification]. . . . The letter probably would have been repulsive to Geli if she had received it. But she never did. Hitler left the letter lying around, and it fell into the hands of his landlady’s son, a certain Doctor Rudolph; perhaps this was one of the reasons for Hitler’s change of lodgings. The letter was in no way suited for publication; it was bound to debase Hitler and make him ridiculous in the eyes of anyone who might see it. For some reason, Hitler seems to have feared that it was Rudolph’s intention to make it public.

  Feared his intention: Implied here is a blackmail threat. According to Heiden, this initial blackmail scheme engendered—as frequently seemed the case in the Hitler demimonde—a second-level blackmail plot by those Hitler employed to pay off the first blackmailer.

  Let’s examine Heiden’s story more closely, since it is the ur-source of the Hitler perversion myth—and of the temptation to believe it. One thing to note about Heiden’s account is that it’s a description of a purported fantasy in a letter that probably never reached Geli. It is not the report of an act, and nowhere does Heiden suggest the act was ever consummated. This story is often conflated with another, later story from Otto Strasser in which Strasser claims Geli weepily confessed to him her unwilling participation in extremely degrading practices with Hitler, practices which seemed to include “undinism.”

  Heiden’s story has an echo if not corroboration (because the echo is a less-reliable source) in the memoirs of Putzi Hanfstaengl, who describes a somewhat similar blackmail attempt on Hitler and includes as a key intermediary one Franz Xaver Schwarz, the party treasurer and longtime Hitler crony who appeared in his apartment before the police did on the morning Geli’s body was found.

  In Hanfstaengl’s version, the “first indication that there was something wrong with the relationship [between Hitler and Geli] came, as I recall, fairly early in 1930 from Franz Xaver Schwarz.” Hanfstaengl says that one day he ran into Schwarz on a Munich street and found him “very down-in-the-mouth.” Schwarz took him to his flat and “poured out what was on his mind. He had just had to buy off someone who had been trying to blackmail Hitler, but the worst part of the story was the reason for it. This man had somehow come into the possession of a folio of pornographic drawings Hitler had made. . . . They were depraved, intimate sketches of Geli Raubal, with every anatomical detail.”

  Hanfstaengl says he was surprised when he found Schwarz still had possession of the ransomed Geli drawings. “Heaven help us, man! Why don’t you tear the filth up?” he asked the party treasurer.

  “No,” he quotes Schwarz replying, “Hitler wants them back. He wants me to keep them in the Brown House safe.”

  There might well be some underlying, lost, earlier Q source for these not-quite-matching versions of the story. But Heiden’s version bears closer inspection because, unlike Hanfstaengl, Heiden enjoyed throughout his life a substantial reputation for journalistic probity. He remains one of the most frequently cited sources for anecdotal material about the Munich Hitler by explainers of all persuasions, including Bullock and Fest. And he is the source for a highly influential school of postwar Hitler explanation, the one embodied best in Alan Bullock’s first biography: the personally corrupt, politically cynical, yet classically explicable Hitler, with Heiden as his Suetonius and Bullock as his Tacitus.

  Consider some excerpts from the highly respectful New York Times obituary of Heiden in 1966:

  Until other scholars began their work on Nazi documents after World War II, Mr. Heiden was the best-known authority outside Germany on the party and its leaders. . . .

  To the leaders of the Third Reich, [Heiden] was a hated and sought-after enemy. One of the Nazis’ acts upon taking over a country was always to ban and burn his books.

  Mr. Heiden is sometimes given credit for popularizing the word “Nazi.” The National Socialists were known in their earliest days by the conventional abbreviation “Naso” until Mr. Heiden, it was said, began using “Nazi”—Bavarian slang for “bumpkin” or “simpleton”—in his articles. . . .

  The writer was a propagandist of a special kind—one who used objectivity and documents to destroy the object of his derision. . . .

  As a writer for the liberal Frankfurter Zeitung . . . his special assignment was the Nazi party. It was said that Hitler sometimes refused to start meetings until Mr. Heiden arrived.

  In 1930 he left the paper to manage an anti-Nazi newspaper syndicate in Berlin. In 1932 his first book, “History of National Socialism,” was publicly burned by the Nazis, who were then on the brink of gaining power. When they took over . . . in 1933, he fled.

  The obituary doesn’t report the fact that Heiden was among the first to publicly air the rumor that Hitler had Jewish blood, and not surprisingly there is no mention of the perversion question, which first appeared in Heiden’s 1944 Der Fuehrer.

  But as the source of two of the most wounding and embarrassing anecdotes about Hitler, Heiden clearly was a target: the obit gives a brief account of his exile and pursuit and last-minute escapes, first from Germany in 1933, then from the Saarland in 1935 (after a Hitler plebiscite restored it to German control), then from Paris in 1940, by way of Lisbon under a false passport, and, finally, to the safety of America.

  The Times concluded its summation of his career by noting “his masterwork was Der Fuehrer: Hitler’s Rise to Power . . . still a standard source for biographers.”

  Would Heiden have adulterated his “masterwork” by inserting a smutty story he fabricated about Hitler’s sexuality, a sensational story that is both defiling and defining? It’s a powerfully explicit explanation for Hitler’s strangeness, alienness: Heiden calls his chapter on Hitler’s personal life, the one containing this anecdote, “The Unhappiest of All Men,” and here, purportedly, is the core of Hitler’s unhappiness.

  Brandeis scholar Rudolph Binion has a skeptical view of Heiden’s story. Binion, a staunch partisan of the Party of Asexuality in the Hitler sexuality debate, believes Hitler had no sexual life, only idealized unconsummated infatuations, because of his overpowering devotion to his mother. He contends that Heiden, founder of the rival Party of Perversion, “can’t be t
rusted” because he “exaggerated to sell books.”

  But a mercenary motive for a putative fabrication of the perversion story doesn’t ring true. I have come to believe that it’s possible to imagine another kind of motive, however: explanation as revenge, as a radical idealistic act of defacement.

  I came to this notion reluctantly and still tentatively. Reluctantly first out of my respect for Heiden, whose work is in many ways indispensable: It offers a more intimate feel for the Munich Hitler than any other subsequent biography. Read in the context of the overabundant wealth of seamy detail Heiden provides about the Caligula’s court surrounding Hitler—a profusion of sexual blackmail and murder scandals often centered around possession of pornographic letters—the story Heiden tells about Hitler’s pornographic letter to Geli and the blackmail plots that it generated doesn’t seem all that unthinkable. In Heiden’s account, Hitler’s perversion is not something that reads as if it’s artificially slapped on but rather as if it’s the hitherto-unseen dark star whose emanations of secrecy and shame influence the visible matter. It made a certain kind of sense, it was tempting to believe.

  But before giving in to the temptation, two alternate possibilities must be considered: (1) that Heiden invented the story; (2) that he might have believed it but adapted it from a source who invented it.

  The Times, it will be recalled, described Heiden as “a propagandist of a special kind—one who used objectivity and documents to destroy the object of his derision.” As a description, it points two ways: The means are objectivity and documentary truth, but the end is to destroy with derision for propaganda’s sake. Could Heiden have felt justified in his struggle against a man he knew capable of ultimate evil to use fair means and foul to destroy him? Recall the lesson the anti-Hitler journalists had learned in the pre-1933 period: Truth and objectivity alone had failed to stop Hitler from coming to power.